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The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source

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597 points doener | 1 comments | 07 Dec 25 13:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.193s | source
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GnarfGnarf ◴[07 Dec 25 13:48 UTC] No.46181666[source]▶
I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty. I'm sure Microsoft, under orders from the U.S. government, could disable all computers in any country or organization, at the flick of a switch.

Imagine how Open Source Software could improve if a consortium of nations put their money and resources into commissioning bug fixes and enhancements, which would be of collective benefit.

Apart from a few niche cases, the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software.

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rocqua ◴[07 Dec 25 15:11 UTC] No.46182235[source]▶
I doubt that Microsoft has a kill switch. Though through automatic updates they still have pretty strong sabotage capabilities.

But the OS is not where Microsofts power lies. Its in exchange (almost everywhere cloud managed, including for many governments) and SharePoint, with a small amount of teams, where Microsoft is truly a scary prospect for sovereignty.

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1. 1718627440 ◴[07 Dec 25 17:22 UTC] No.46183309[source]▶
They absolutely have. They force upgrade computers to Windows 11, which then won't boot, because the system doesn't actually support it. I guess they also have a smoother way to achieve that. They are also cases where an update broke the booting process, so the bitlocker key was lost. Everything is encrypted with it by default, and the only copy sits on a MS server connected with you MS account. Guess what happens when they say sorry, we can't just give you that key...